ai and the job search w/ vp of eng, andrew moore

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[Music] Alrighty. Good morning everybody. I'm I'm alerting the alerting the masses. We got a tag on Discord. We got to text my texting community. We got to go live on Tik Toks all over the place. But good morning. I um I was telling Andrew backstage, I'm a little bit on a struggle bus. I've had a virus that has about 16 syllables. Um, my wife got my wife got tested for it. Um, it is brutal. Um, so if you sense if you hear some congestion, um, I'll try to mute my mic as much as possible. For the people who tune in on Tik Tok, I can't mute my mic on TikTok, so you're just going to have to hear me clear my throat, but we're feeling better.

Uh, last night I got hit with cockpit. Not that y'all really care. Uh, I just think this thing's fascinating. This thing's like the seven deadly sins. Uh, this thing's awful. So, highly recommend. And also I think bless her heart I think Briana my coworker we have not been together. I think she got it too. Uh so bless her heart. Um but anyways but so today uh we are getting started a little early today. Um I actually have a I have a have some to go to by 10. So we get started just a little bit earlier today. So please say hey. We'd love to hear from you.

Um again what I tell folks is this is a this is a meetup. This is a virtual meetup and the guest is Andrew. Uh we just do it virtually. So please say hey we'd love to hear from you. Uh, please connect with everybody in the chat. Connect with Andrew. He's a great dude. He's in Nashville kind of. We talked about that back. Um, uh, he's a little outside Nashville. Um, and um, so again, super pumped for this conversation. Um, before we dive in, kind of some housekeeping things. First off, I'm a I'm a hero uh for AppRight. Um, I'm always joke that I'm the only non-technical hero on a technical uh, hero program.

Um, they just released some pretty cool stuff. I don't know what it is. I have no idea, but it seems cool. So, you should go check it out. Um uh and then Torque, like I said, we do a ton of stuff at Torque, our community, all the streams. So go go go check us out. We actually have a calendar, like you know, back in the day, um Andrew, when you used to like scroll through cable and you used to go to the guides and you can everything, that's basically what we have. We have like a TV guide, but it's like a community guide. You can see all of our streams going off.

So check that out. Uh then again, if you want to be I I made a comment about this. If if you want uh to be texted when I go live with cool guests like Andrew, shoot me a text. That's actually my number. Uh, we got some people tuning in this morning. Roxy, Roxy, TA, Amelia, Jordan, Sebastian, Ricardo, Chris, Mark. What's going on y'all? It's good to see y'all. Got some people tuning in again. We are a little early this morning, so I have somewhere to go. But enough of me yapping. Uh, partially because my voice is like I feel going out. Uh, Angel, let's give the people what they want, man.

Who are you? What do you do? Uh, and we'll go from there. All right. So, I am currently VP of software engineering at a nationwide mortgage lender out of Cleveland, Ohio. So, working remote, shout out to that. Um, but we are really trying to to navigate the the challenges of the modern world that seems to have come out of nowhere with with AI and with machine learning and frankly an entirely different data strategy. Yeah. Yeah. Absolutely. Absolutely. So, um, so Andrew hit me up, um, from that LinkedIn post. I'm sure some of y'all saw just around like what does AI look like when it comes to junior developers?

Is it actually taking people's jobs? You know, I started to uh tell this to Andrew backstage and Andrew was like, let's just pause because you're about to make me go go in on it. I said, okay. So, what I told Andrew backstage is like, I think you have two different camps and and I don't think either camp is wrong. and everybody I'm about to say I love everybody. So you have Angie Jones, Kent C Dods, Gant uh from Infinite Red, um who are like MCP this rag this AI that you know you have uh Tas Data Stacks all yada yada yada. Then you have your Kent your Ken Wheelers of the world uh that basically go f this.

This is dumb. This doesn't exist. You have people saying, you know, uh you basically have people saying like Aaron Francis posting a tweet about, you know, is AI actually taking your job? Um I've heard podcasts that are like AI is not really even AI. It just kind of gets you 50 60% of the way there. So, is that even considered AI? There's just a lot here, right? Um, and so, a Andrew, I kind of want to start there and kind of hear your thoughts on all that. So, the the thing that's stuck with me the most is if you're scrolling through social through LinkedIn or wherever, it's an echo chamber, man.

It it's no one has a no one that I've seen consistently has a balanced opinion. And realistically, that's what tech always is. there's always some silver bullet that's going to come out and and save the world. You know, we see it every time. We see it with Kubernetes. We saw it with cloud. We saw it with AI. Now, you get the early adopters that think this stuff is the the bees knees. We're going to go all in. And they're not wrong, but then you also have the the detractors that say this is this is BS. This isn't going to work. This is terrible. And the real answer, the right answer is somewhere in the middle, I think.

Yeah. Yeah. Absolutely. So, let's let's let's highlight let's talk about junior dev specifically. Yeah. You are only one person. I'm only one person. I have not seen people come out and say, "We're not hiring junior developers because of AI." Have you seen anything like that? No. Okay. No. Are you do you think with what you know that that is that that AI is forcing junior engineers out of jobs? This is a little hot take central. It's okay. It's okay. What's the the caveat? This does not constitute financial advice. Yeah. Yeah. This is not financial advice. It's just two dudes yapping. What I got to say is I think what we have with in in AI is just bad timing because AI is really come to the forefront of the zeitgeist at the same time that the economy has uh not been performing well.

I just talked about this recently. I keep going. Yeah. Yeah. Keep going. Well, it but so you have all of these layoffs and you see it front and center on every major news media. you. Fang is laying off, Microsoft's laying off, Meta's laying off to replace their I saw the headline yesterday, they're replacing their ad business with AI. I think a lot of it is poor timing. Companies are scaling back for sure. I'm, you know, me included. Sure. But the the fact that they're trying to attach that scale back to AI, I think is is too much. Yes. I've literally talked about this. I said I said I think the problem is is people want something to blame.

Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. And I think the job it's what I talked about this I I feel like 2021 2022 from the job search perspective is like that exgirlfriend who just got crazy, right? Who was awesome but then just got crazy. You remember her or or ex-boyfriend. You remember them as what they were. They were great. They were wonderful. They treated you right. and then they just like jumped off a cliff and just were like brutal. Yeah, that's what the job search is. And we all try to think about what it was in 2122. It's not it's not coming back. And so I feel like instead of saying, hey, this is the this is the reality of what we're in right now.

They're going to be now it's like, oh well, no, it's AI's fault that people aren't hiring. No, no, no, no. People weren't hiring before AI. And go ahead. Go ahead. Well, the the thing that the thing that I want to critique on too is job hiring managers still need to be engaged. And I think that what's what I'm seeing a lot of and a lot of the the complaints on LinkedIn and the the fear comes from, you know, I saw TikTok where somebody joined and they were filming their interview and they're interviewing with an AI agent. Yeah, I saw that. I don't know how real that is, but that's so dumb.

That's so dumb. But if you as a hiring manager are using AI to provide the first touch to your candidate, and you as a candidate are using AI for the first touch for your hiring manager, you're both wasting your time. You're making it look bad. You're you're not giving people the respect that they deserve on either side of that. Correct. Yeah. Do you what what would be your advice based off what you've seen again, your opinion? How do you think junior devs because again this whole this whole thing came out of the post about junior specifically. Yeah. What changes between what juniors had to do prequel unquote AI or now?

Like I feel like it's always been hard. Yeah. And with anything and it this it's it's no different than it was when I was trying to get into the business too. You have tools that come that become available. You're a technologist. You clearly care about this stuff. You need to stay up to date. There are new tools that are available. And holy smokes, these tools are really powerful if used correctly. So, you need to be up to date. You need to to be a practitioner. That doesn't mean that you have to issue all of the your traditional learning. like you sh you still should know how to use your tools on the back end to vet the AI, but also if you can get to a prototype with with some help, why wouldn't you do that?

Yeah. Is there now I know there's a lot within AI there's it's a wide umbrella. Yeah. Yeah. It's Yeah. So, like what should junior devs or people getting started in their career know what to use or like what are some things folks should need to use? So, I think there's a there's a widening gap between what part of the industry you're going into. If you're a junior dev that just wants to get a job and work in enterprise and do, you know, your your standard full stack development, then I think realistically just get up to speed with the the the LLMs, the chat GPTs, the whatever.

You can dig into the the code gen a little bit if you want to use like Versel is one that Vzero is one I've been playing with a lot lately for front end because it is not my strong suit. Yeah. But realistically in regulated industries and in big business, it's going to be a while before that stuff becomes really mainstream. Like I had a conversation with with somebody in Fortune 5 healthcare yesterday and they've been told do not not allowed full stop. So I think for a for a long time it's going to take a bit. I don't know what long time means anymore. Maybe that means two days, but who knows?

But if you're going to go into the startup space more fastm moving then I think you need to be in with both feet because you at that point your CTOs your CIOS your CEOs have a lot more influence on your direct job placement and function. And in that world it's all about revenue. So move fast, get the get the feature out. Don't care so much about the tech debt these days. So, shove it out. Let's get revenue. Let's get the uh the ARR. Let's let we got to get this thing up up up and running and and lengthen the runway. So, all of that to say, I think your mileage may vary, but it's the the the most forefront tools for junior devs.

I I don't think you're going to need to care about the image generation, the video generation. Sure, you should know about it because I think that's going to propagate a lot of misinformation on the internet. But I think that's for for everybody, not just junior devs. Yeah, absolutely. Um, interesting. Nicole says, "Uh, I got rejected from a job because I didn't I don't use cursor." Interesting. There you go. This is why we do this. So, do we again, we are just one piece of the pie, one piece of the puzzle. Um, so I'm I'm glad I'm glad you let us know that. I think here here's a Let's say let's say we draw a line in the internet in in section of the internet right you had your mainframe then you had kind of like the web as we know it and then you have I'm sure you can break it down more but this is just the way my brain thinks old legacy what we know now and then let's say there's been a line in the sand with AI vibe coding I had a guest on, I forgot who it was last week.

We talked about this topic about how there's going to be so much legacy code to maintain. What if what if what if we stopped doing boot camps on the latest and greatest JavaScript and we start teaching like core Java and like VB.NET. I hear me out, right? Because like the thing fact of the matter is is that there's good you can do a lot of the stuff within these vibe coding tools. Now, is it scalable? I don't know. That's probably another conversation in of itself, but it's like I feel like you really want to separate yourself as a junior developer, learn old code. Thoughts on that?

I mean, it hurts my feelings because it doesn't feel like that should be old code, but I guess it is now. I know. I know. I know. I I asked the I asked that same question a few weeks back and the core of it is the question of what how do we train junior devs? How do we train people entering the the industry and what do you train them on? Right? I I still maintain that knowing call it core Java or just enterprise development forms the strongest foundation you can have to an engineering career. Yeah. Let me ask you this. Let me let me ask you this hypothetically here.

Let's say I'm a developer, junior developer. I am a junior developer. I don't know anything. Let's say I come to you and I've vibed out some something. I just think vibe vibe coding is ridiculous because I've been saying like vibe stuff for years and now it's like a thing. So let's say like I vibe code some sort of solution and then somebody else comes to interview a junior developer and has like put together like a application that's very simple but it's in older legacy tech. I would imagine you're probably gonna look at the developer with the older legacy tech than somebody like me who used Vzero and all these other tools to spin up an app, right?

I would hope so. Yeah. I mean, right. The the challenge here for the hiring manager is the volume at which they have to scale through resumes and applications. Yeah. So, you know, for for instance, I posted a role. It's been back in September, so things have changed since then, but I posted a role on Friday night. It was like 8:00 on Friday night. And then woke up Monday morning, checked in on my workday app, and I had like 900 applicants. So, you have to ask yourself, how do you stand out against that 900 applicants? And we're not we're not even getting to the the code set yet, but I would agree 100% the candidate that's going to edge out in my mind is going to be the one that has a a solid solution.

Yeah, you can just looking at some of these V vzero solutions. And I'm not knocking it because I've used it, but just looking at it, you can get you get the impression that the the dialect isn't human. You know what I mean? Right. Yeah. Yeah. Absolutely. So, and and so here's kind of here's this theory that I'm kind of playing on is that I feel like over the course of the next 30 years, I think more bluecollar jobs are going to be a thing, right? I always look at attention. Where is the attention and how can people break in? How can h how how can like for example like when I network with people I talk about networking all the time you know this when I try to network with somebody online I go to I go to a profile of theirs where they don't have a lot of attention right so in the same way for the job search there is so much attention right now for vibe coding and stuff I'm like you want to really separate yourself you know and and I know um uh Nicole said why core Java Uh there's a lot of legacy code written in Core Java.

I bet you there is not 2,000 applications. There is not 2,000 applications uh for a a core Java job. I'm just going to say it probably not. Now again, I'm not saying everybody should like, you know, learn mainframe tomorrow, but I think it is going to be an interesting trend. the I I think going back to the core of what you mean core Java it's an arbitrary choice like here in Nashville it'snet all the time right because healthcare healthcare and Microsoft stack go hand in hand but it it's any call it arbitrary core enterprise platform the the thing you just said about um understanding really understanding what it is that you're building It's it's the difference between you've got, call it an interior designer that's able to spruce up a house or spruce up a building versus the architect that designs the building versus the engineer that designs the materials that goes into the building.

Yeah. Can you make it can that engineer make things pretty? Maybe by his eyes, but probably not for most people. But I can I can darn well tell you that I want that engineer building the materials, not the interior designer. Right. Right. Well, I feel like and again, you've hired. So, I feel like at the end of the day, it comes down to why did you do it? Why why did you do what you do? And I feel like a lot of these tools uh um can be a crutch. Prime example, I talked with one of my buddies. He's a lawyer the other the other day.

He says he's getting calls all the time. all the time uh about um these AI tools. He because he asked me he's like, "What what's all this AI stuff?" And I tried to tell him and he was like he was like, you know, it was interesting. He goes, I I I gave this AI tool a case like an of a problem and it pulled two cases, but he goes there was actually a third fringe case that you really have to know law. and he goes, "It didn't pull it up, so I'm not going to use it." Because like I know that, but it didn't know that.

And so I feel like it applies the same thing with code. You can do all this stuff in the vibe tool, but at the end of the day, as a hiring manager, and if I'm interviewing for especially junior, I need to know, you need to know why I did something. Yeah, that that's a perfect way to put it. One of the things that I always ask in interviews, no matter what the level is, I'm just expecting different answers is I'm asking about opinions. Like what opinions do you have about an architectural design pattern or what opinions do you have about this implementation? I think with the the introduction of AI, it gives this opportunity for us to hey, I need an app real quick.

Send me some some code. It's like it's like back in the early days when we went to Stack Overflow and we copy pasted stuff out and made it work. And that's what we did as juniors. I think everyone universally did that at some point. And you get to you get to check in and code review like, "Hey, why why'd you do this?" Uh I don't know. I'll be honest. I copied it and it works now, so I'm good. And then we got our hands slapped and you you moved on and that's how you grow and that's how you build. But AI can generate some stuff that's really niche and really custom purpose-built.

Yeah. And I think it it runs into this scenario where what happens when chat GPT is down? What happens when when your your platform isn't available? I mean, you're on an airplane working on a feature or whatever. I I know it's I'm a little get off my lawn right now, but No, I listen. That's okay. That's okay. That's okay. You're You're the guy off the mic right now. If you want to be get off your lawn, I'm all about it. I'm all about it there. So, I want to get some comments here. Um Stephen comes in here. Agreed. Taylor, think about how many enterprise applications out there on Legacy Code that still need to be maintained.

I know companies looking for junior cobalt dubs. Yeah. Yeah. I mean, I know a girl in Raleigh when I was there. We used to work out together at CrossFit. She got her career start by doing Cobalt in Raleigh. There's so much insurance and banking in Raleigh. Her first job was a junior cobalt developer. Um, let's see here. I got I saw some more comments. Also, Andrew, are you a guitarist outside of the desk? Why would you think that? Yeah. Yes, it's Nashville native. It uh comes with the territory. Yeah. So, Amelia asks, "What is vibe coding? How would you describe vibe coding?" We didn't even talk about this.

Should have probably broken it down. I saw somebody respond. I think it was the best the the answer was the worst the worst trend to ever come about. Um but vibe coding the way I would describe it is basically product management or product ownership on steroids. You have Oh, I like that. I I haven't heard it that way. Oh, so I've got a a short coming up with I've got my own podcast, right? Not going to advertise too much, but the the bit was give it to give a vibe coding platform to a product owner and see how long it takes to come to to make an app and see what that process looks like.

The the concept of vibe coding is I'm sitting in front of a prompt and I'm telling the platform vzero.dev is the one I use, so whatever. But you're you're describing what you want to see in the application. Generally, you're describing it in functionality prompts, but you can you can start to get into some of the architectural buildout and some of the implementation choices, but generally it's kind of just throw the throw the requirements at the machine and let it spit it back out to you. Yep. Yep. Absolutely, Jess. Yeah. The worst toys ever created. Uh, got it. learning mainframe tomorrow. I'm telling you, I want to do a whole entire like marketing thing about like like around mainframe.

Like I was in a conversation with some uh Torque and Ronside people about doing like a mainframe practice, creating community for mainframe, doing like really sick 80s style merch. Uh I think it would crush right now. Um let's see here. What else? Uh Greg, former guest of the show. Um uh Greg looking good in that profile pick, buddy. Um the biggest issue as I see is a loss of critical thinking skills. Yeah, my critical thinking skills are garbage. Um so I use AI externally for my tooling to help more as a good replacement. That's all I'm willing to do right now. Thoughts on this, Andrew?

No, I think that's fair. The I heard it described that AI and I know we're overgeneralizing the term, but so much involved. Yeah. Yeah. is that AI is like a really well- read intern that doesn't need to sleep. So, I like that. It requires some oversight. I think that is a perfect approach. And one of the ways that I found it to be most effective is like a sounding board. You know, olden days, you used to rubber duck was the term. So, you describe a problem to the rubber ducky on your desk and the act of talking it out. Yeah. Even though there's no one responding is sometimes helpful to you figuring out the problem.

But if you if that didn't work, you went to the forums or you had to phone a friend. Yeah. But the way that I've f found value these days is let me just talk to the machine for a bit help and let it ask me questions and we kind of figure out a little more about the problem or a little more about strategy works really well for for marketing strategy, business strategy, high level architecture. Your mileage may vary, but that's where it comes into skills and opinions. Yeah, I love that. I love that. Uh let's see here. Okay, I'm coming over here. I'm just catching up on all his tech, all these messages.

A lot of messages. A lot of people have thoughts. Podcast Jordan just posted about um actually the the AI helping to develop their critical thinking skills. That's kind of what I was saying, too. You you have a a sounding board that gives you alternative ways to think about a problem. And I found myself saying a few times like, "Oh, that's a pretty good idea. I hadn't thought of it that way." Yeah. I think I think yeah I think um uh who so this isn't quite in line with what Jordan said but kind of sort of I worked with a guy on his resume and he actually used chat GPT to prompt him on how to write the resume and then he sent me the resume to review and it was pretty solid and so um you know I I I do think Like I haven't used it a ton.

I mainly use it as like Google really at this point. Um but like the few times where I've used it to like sort out a problem from me, it it is it is it is interesting. It does give you a different way of thinking for sure. I've always wondered and I I I started to do a a bit of AB testing, but I didn't make it very far. But I've always wondered how résumés generated by the LLMs perform against ATS because effectively they're kind of different sides of the same coin, right? Yeah. You would think that the machine would be able to provide something that the machine can read.

Well, you would think you would think, but a lot of the AI resumes are they're very fluffy. There's just no Sure. There's just no substance. Um Sure. What else, man, as we kind of wrap up here? Um, what what what are some other things that junior devs should be thinking about when they interview? Are are have you interviewed some folks recently and just want to share some dos and don'ts of what people are doing? I don't know. Just kind of some general interviewing tips. Yeah. I mean, I think it all goes back to humanity. That's what we do well. The machine doesn't do humanity well, obviously.

Maybe yet. I don't know if that's tongue and cheek yet or not, but um I think the the key is present yourself well. that your your your entire brand, your online presence, your application, your resume, make it cohesive, feel human. If you want to use chat GPT to help you with some of the content, that's fine, but in moderation because it it can come off kind of saccharine sweet. You you in a lot of cases, you read you read the the resume content or the cover letter. Lord help me. a cover letter. It's just if it's just copy pasted out of chat GPT, it's obvious.

And that that's more frustrating than anything because I took the time to download it, read it, and realize that you didn't take the time to write it. So, I think at the end of the day, if you want to use it as a starting point to generate content and to generate the the concept, great. Make sure it's in your words. Make sure it feels like you. make sure you have a a holistic view of who you are so that as I go out and look, I don't see a name on a a resume and then there's nothing else. So, I wonder if you're a, you know, a Chinese spy or whatever.

Yeah. Yeah. Absolutely. Uh Jesse comes in here. I mean, us and I, you know, obviously got plugged Torque here. We don't send resumes like if Andrew were to hire from Torque. We don't send resumes. We send actual profiles that dig into what people have done. um you know we have our matching team kind of create their profile and it's it's this really specific thing. I I I do think resumeéumés unfortunately they're just is not like unfortunately the industry is just I don't think going to move on from résumés. It is just it is ingrained in the past. It is ingrained in what we use. But I do think hiring companies like Torque and and I think companies uh I think staffing companies need to be starting to be more creative on how to show content to hiring managers as it relates to uh the candidate.

Um and yeah, I think job job descriptions suck. Most of them suck. Most of them suck. Most people suck at writing them. Yeah. Yeah. Absolutely. Absolutely. Um cool. All right. So, as we wrap up here, Andrew, thanks, man. This is great. A lot of lot of people's thought, a lot of people had thoughts. Uh, this is good. So, kind of run through kind of some rapire questions for you. Uh, first thing I always ask, do you a coffee or a tea drinker? Coffee. High octane all the time. Hot or cold? Hot. No. So, all right. Sorry. So, I I this is why this is why I worked this questioning because I want to hear people's thoughts.

For me, if you're drinking hot coffee, you're just drinking hot liquid. You can't taste the actual coffee. You just don't have good coffee. Okay. Okay. All right. Next question. Um, as we kind of talked about AI, I know you kind of mentioned some tools v0ero. Are you tinkering with anything else on the side that are is pretty interesting right now to you? Yeah, I mean, professionally, we're Microsoft shop, so we're dug into Microsoft Fabric and Copilot these days. the the thing that we're doing the most is machine learning. It's still it's still traditional move the move and clean the data. There's no there's no magic button yet.

So it it's if right now we're doing lead qualification which is really really stinking cool. But yeah, you still have to have good data and it still requires a data professional and it still requires skills. I love it. I love it. Um, final question. Show's called Guidance Counselor 2.0 because we had guidance counselors in middle school, high school, and college, but now as adults, we don't really have them. What would be your biggest piece of career advice to young Andrew if you can go back in time? Oh, man. Think about what it is you want to do and don't just do the next thing that becomes available because it's lucrative.

There you go. You got choices. I love it. I love it. Uh, also Jesse, exactly what you said. Uh, 100%. All right. So, y'all have a good one. Appreciate y'all. Tomorrow morning, um, we have Bradley Stokes on the show. So, Brad Brad and I have been in each other's networks. I've talked to him in his past job search. He's been in my network now for five or six years. He is he's like a CIO VP level candidate. Um, and he recently went through a pretty long job search and he recently got a job as a VP of engineering. So, we're going to talk about it um, and on the show tomorrow.

It's going to be good. Anyways, yall have a good one. Andrew, stay on. I can say bye to you backstage. We'll see youall tomorrow morning, 9:30 a.m.